Costs and Benefits
Benefits Smart Power Grids offer many attractive benefits that make them a marked improvement over current power grids. At the base level, Smart Power Grids can transmit energy more efficiently in various ways. One of the most interesting ways is '''Demand-Side Management '''which uses information systems to monitor electricity demand/price, and using this information to turn off certain appliances such as air conditioners when prices are peaked. Not only does this reduce peak demand for energy, but it also reduces the total cost of electricity for individuals since they avoid using energy when it is most expensive. Another benefit for individuals is that Smart Power Grids will give them real-time information about their energy usage, allowing them to actively monitor how much energy they use, as well as how various appliances in their home affect their energy usage. Making this information so readily available will give people a clear picture about how they're using energy, and will empower them to make effective choices in reducing energy usage and costs. Another huge benefit of Smart Power Grids is a significant improvement in reliability and recovery. If a small outage occurs, Smart Power Grids will be able to quickly identify and isolate them by rerouting power around the outages. This improves reliability in two ways, first, by rerouting power around an outage, it prevents the outage from interrupting peoples' power and mininimizes energy downtime that people must deal with. Second, isolating outages ensures that they are not able to expand and become large blackouts, making the power network more resilient to disruptions. Should a significant power outage occur due to an emergency of some sort, the Smart Power Grid is also capable of rebounding more effectively by using its more advanced network. One significant way that this could be used is to reroute and restore power to emergency services first after an incident, allowing them to better respond to the situation. Though the aforementioned benefits are significant, possibly the most important benefit for future development is the fact that Smart Power Grids are far better suited for usage with renewable energy sources such as wind turbines and solar panels. The current power grid is not optimized for use with renewable energy sources at all for many reasons, which is actually inhibiting the viability and growth of renewable energy. One of the biggest problems is that th current power grid simply isn't designed to accomodate renewable energy sources, as it is very rigid and does not support multiple feed-in sources of energy (which renewable energy sources such as wind turbines require). Smart Power Grids are flexible enough to not only accept multiple power inputs, but their infrastructure is designed to make optimal use of all these energy sources. Futhermore, current grids don't have the capability to effectively deal with fluctuations in energy production that are inherent in renewable energy (for example, if it is a particularly windy day, wind turbines would produce more energy than usual, and vice-versa), but Smart Power Grids is able to effectively work around these fluctuations by having energy storage reservoirs to hold excess energy that can be used to make up for any drops in energy due to renewable energy fluctuations. Last but not least, current power grids are primarily designed to serve the places where power demand is highest such as major cities, but the majority of renewable energy sources are in remote locations far off of cities, and there are no hugely efficient methods of transporting energy from one to the other. Smart Power Grids will be able to incorporate what some call an "electric superhighway", which will eliminate the issue of renewable power sources being too far away from the cities where energy is needed most by quickly and efficiently transferring energy over long distances. Costs The economic cost of implementing Smart Power Grids is not insignificant. Current estimates place the cost of deploying Smart Power Grids across the country at anywhere between $338 billion and $476 billion over the next 20 years. Beyond this, proponents of Smart Power Grids are urging power companies to invest approximately $20 billion of their own money every year into into researching new technologies to support Smart Power Grids. While this seems like a a downside to the power companies, it is also a blow to the consumers, as analysts all predict that if these investment costs would be passed on to the consumers, giving them an increase in their monthly bills for a promise of future savings. To be fair, new studies by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) estimate that Smart Power Grids will effectively save almost $2 Trillion over the next 20 years, but despite these huge returns, they are still just speculation, so they must be taken with a grain of salt. Of course, not all costs are economic, there are other concerns that people have about Smart Power Grids, primarily regarding abuse and privacy. Some critics are worried that the variable rates will open up avenues for power companies to manipulate their consumers and charge them more by citing supposedly increased rates at some points. While this would ideally not be a concern, in the past large companies have used a lack of information transparancy to overcharge their users. Another concern that is particularly relevant in the current global concern about privacy is that fact that some consumers aren't comfortable with their energy usage data being available to various bodies such as law enforcement. While they are not economic costs, both of these concerns are legitmate costs that must be considered when deciding whether or not to implement Smart Power Grids.